Shayne Looper: We don’t get to write our own mission statement

When I was in grade school our art class did a pottery unit for a couple of weeks. Without question, I was the worst student potter in the history of the school.

Shayne Looper

When I was in grade school our art class did a pottery unit for a couple of weeks. Without question, I was the worst student potter in the history of the school.

Almost all my works turned out to be ashtrays, but my mother displayed them as if they were masterpieces. My emerald green ashtray was still on her coffee table the day she died.

I did make an alligator once, during my green period. I’m not sure what I intended it to be when I started, but when the teacher asked what it was, I thought it looked more like an alligator than anything else, so that’s what I told her. My mother placed it on the table next to the ashtray.

Some of my classmates were good at making pottery. They made things their parents could actually use, like cups, plates and bowls. They painted their pieces in a variety of colors and added flowers and other designs.

Imagine how a child would feel whose father decides to use her lovely bowl as a doorstop. Since it is too light to work well, he places rocks in the bowl to weigh it down.

The child would be disappointed — and understandably so. She made the bowl to hold apples, not rocks; to decorate the kitchen table, not the garage floor. The creator gets to decide what a thing is and how it should work. Even I got to decide that my creation was an alligator.

The idea that the creator gets to decide what a thing is and how it should work gets played out in other ways. The makers of the insomnia drug Lunesta say that it should be taken exactly as prescribed right before you get into bed. They’re the creators; they get to decide what their creation is and how it should work.

When we ignore what the creator says, we get in trouble. Just ask Aerosmith’s front man Steven Tyler. Just before he went on stage at a concert in South Dakota in 2009, he snorted Lunesta up his nose to treat, he claims, a problem with his feet. But he soon had other problems: he fell off the stage and broke his shoulder, forcing the band to cancel the rest of the tour.

This idea that the creator gets to decide what a thing is and how it should work is one of the fundamental principles of the Christian faith. God is creator — hence the first line of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” — and he gets to decide who we are and how we should work.

The psalmist sums up this idea in just two lines: “Know that the LORD is God. It is he who made us, and we are his.”

But that idea flies in the face of contemporary beliefs. Television and movies (from the cartoons our three-year-olds watch to those artsy Academy Award-winning films) never tire of telling us to follow our own path and discover “our own truth,” even when that means casting off the restraints of traditional morality. Only you can decide what is best for your life.

It is the message of the secular gospel: “I believe in me. I make myself, and I am my own person.” And, since the demise of the Judeo-Christian ethic at the end of the 19th century, the only guide left to follow in self-formation is one’s feelings – one’s current feelings.

This means we have no blueprint to follow; we measure and build by eye. In practical terms, we exchange submission to a wise God’s plan for slavery to capricious feelings.

Tony Payne, publishing director for Matthias Media, says the idea that personal freedom is the highest goal in life “is in the air we breathe, the TV shows and movies we watch, the books we read, the education system we are raised in.” That means it’s in us.

But if we really have a creator who made us for his own purposes, then the idea that I can be whatever I want is dangerously misleading. “We don’t get to write our own mission statement,” Payne says. “It simply is not our right. Our reason for existing is not self-derived or self-determined.” The Creator gets to decide what we are and how we should work.

Shayne Looper is the pastor at the Lockwood Community Church in Michigan. He can be reached at salooper@frontier.com.

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